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But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more
divine, by which we are human beings, or that other which springs
from the All?
Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and
shared memories; and when the two souls are together, the
memories also are as one; when they stand apart, assuming that
both exist and endure, each soon for gets the other's affairs,
retaining for a longer time its own. Thus it is that the Shade of
Hercules in the lower regions- this "Shade," as I take it, being
the characteristically human part- remembers all the action and
experience of the life, since that career was mainly of the
hero's personal shaping; the other souls [soulphases] going to
constitute the joint-being could, for all their different
standing, have nothing to recount but the events of that same
life, doings which they knew from the time of their association:
perhaps they would add also some moral judgement.
What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not
told: what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul
would recount?
The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did
and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes,
memories of the lives lived before, some of the events of the
most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it grows away
from the body, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal
state, and if it passes in and out of one body after another, it
will tell over the events of the discarded life, it will treat as
present that which it has just left, and it will remember much
from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to
forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.
Then free and alone at last, what will it have to remember?
The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what
faculty of the soul memory resides.
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